


A Way to Get Back Home

by flowercrownremus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, M/M, Mentioned suicide, general anxiety stuff, very obliquely implied csa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-28 15:39:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2737853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowercrownremus/pseuds/flowercrownremus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>At three Harry starts running.</i>
</p><p>After James and Lily die in a car crash, Sirius and Remus raise Harry together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Way to Get Back Home

At three Harry starts running. Before this he waddled, walked, toddled, crawled, and stumbled with great enthusiasm if not great coordination, but at the farmer’s market one spring day, while Remus considers fat red strawberries and mangoes so ripe the bright scent bursts from the speckled skin, Harry gains his legs and, without Remus quite realizing what has happened, peels away from his place at Remus’s side.

“Oh for the love of — ” Remus drops the mango back into the pile and, ignoring the rising grip of panic at his throat, calls, “Harry, come back,” but if the boy can hear Remus, he pays him no mind. Whatever lured him — a stray dog, an ice cream cart, the shine of copper-colored hair in the sun — carries him into the crowd that has gathered around a local beekeeper’s stall. Remus spots him for a moment beside a flapping hand-lettered banner asking WHAT’S THE BUZZ. “Harry!” Remus shouts again. A few heads turn his direction, but Harry disappears amongst the legs of a few dozen honey enthusiasts, and, with a sigh, Remus gives chase.

He learned to be fast on his crutches at school. He’d had to be, with James and Sirius and Peter as friends: healthy, active teenage boys who played football and snuck out of the dormitory at night and never once considered it might be smarter to leave their crooked-legged roommate behind. Once after a prank gone awry, he’d successfully fled the school caretaker with only one of his crutches and a broken nose to boot. But that was years ago, and at any rate there hadn’t been a bag to deal with, and a crowd of people standing in his way, and no one had bloody _grabbed him_ as he passed. “I’m fine,” he says, shaking them off. The next person in his way he asks, his words fast and flat, “Have you seen a little boy? Three years old, running like the devil?” and when she shrugs he pushes by her, his eyes tracking through the crowd for any sign of Harry. 

Remus hates this goddamn farmer’s market.

Likelihood is, Harry has just wandered behind some stall, looking for sweets. Maybe one of their neighbors will recognize him and pull him out of harm’s way, but then again, maybe he will hurt himself, or maybe someone will hurt him, or maybe — well. He is just so small.

Remus navigates past the beekeepers, and a stall selling mushrooms, and another advertising the city’s best pasties. The smell of fried potato, curry, steaming pies, candyfloss … Harry might follow any of these or none of them. Two sad-eyed bulldogs lie in the shade of an oak tree in the distance. In the carpark, a tiny white puppy with pricked-up ears jerks his owner along as he skips across the rough pavement. Across the street, on the lush green of the park, a pair of redheaded boys kick a football back and forth. Remus whirls round and round again, looking for a scarlet jumper or a head of messy black hair. 

“Harry!” he calls, head going fuzzy with fright. “Harry Potter!” And just as he opens his mouth to shout again, ready to scrape his throat raw with the force of it if need be, he hears —

“I’ve got him, Remus.”

— and there’s Sirius, with Harry hoisted up on his hip, the boy’s head tucked into Sirius’s neck. They look perfect together, as always, and safe, and whole. Harry blinks his sleepy green eyes at Remus and grins.

“Sorry, Moony,” Sirius says, “my fault entirely. He saw me and bolted. I meant to surprise you but — ”

“It’s fine.” Remus inhales and exhales through his nose carefully, but of course Sirius can see the flush in his cheeks, can hear the strain in his voice, and when Sirius raises his eyebrows at him, he leans in to kiss the top of Harry’s head to show that he’s fine. He sighs when Sirius’s free hand settles on the small of his back. “Aren’t you meant to be at work?”

“A fuse blew and the electricity’s out so they let us go early. Thought I’d find you here. Had no idea this one — ” He bounces Harry to get his attention. “— would do a runner. Harry, you can’t run away from Remus like that again, all right? He’s already going gray, he doesn’t need your help.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Though it does make him look very distinguished.”

Sirius’s smile dulls the throb of adrenaline through Remus’s body. Since they were young he knew how to say with a smile that everything is going to be all right, the prank won’t go wrong, no one will get hurt, of course it’s not a mistake for two best friends to fall in love, and mostly, Remus has believed him. For better or for worse, Remus has believed in him.

“All right?” Sirius slides his knuckles against Remus’s spine. “I’ve got my car, let’s just go. Don’t worry,” he says before Remus can protest, “I’ve no doubt the rainforests will survive if we buy eggs from Sainsbury’s just this once. Let’s go home.”

“Yes,” Remus says, “let’s.”  


  


* * *

  


Remus will never know why he picked up that day.

He and Sirius had been fighting again, hadn’t spoken in a week, in fact — not since Sirius, with that edge in his voice that meant he’d been drinking even if his lips bore no taste of liquor, had said that it felt like he hardly knew Remus anymore. “You never come round,” he’d said, “it’s like you never want to see me,” and Remus, with a migraine shimmering at the edge of his vision after a long day temping at a law firm that would never actually hire him, and with every weekend for the foreseeable future scheduled to be spent sitting behind the till at a secondhand clothes shop, being paid pennies to let customers talk down to him, had replied in a thin voice, “Not all of us have Black family money to fall back on.” Later, he almost regretted it. Not because it wasn’t true — if Alphard’s money had not quite buoyed Sirius back to the egregious level of wealth he’d possessed when he was the accepted scion of Orion and Walburga Black, it was nonetheless a generous inheritance — but because Regulus had only been dead three months, and every mention of Sirius’s family reminded him that his brother had killed himself and he hadn’t been able to stop it.

So late that Halloween night, when his phone rang and Sirius’s name and handsome face, smile like a white dagger, rose to the top of the display, he was still not quite ready to forgive Sirius. He answered anyway.

That night lasted a thousand years: the chemical smell of the hospital, Sirius’s blank eyes, the bright white bandage on Harry’s brown forehead. “I can’t do this by myself,” Sirius said, and stared down at Harry, wriggling comfortably his godfather’s arms, where he’d slept a hundred times, untouched for now by the sorrow of what he had lost. “Moony,” and Sirius’s voice was wrecked, “please.” Remus leaned his crutches against the wall and took up the seat beside Sirius, who looked so young and so uncertain. “You have to help me.”

“Of course I will. But you’ll be great. Just look at him, Sirius — he loves you like mad. You’ll be just fine. And I’ll be right here with you. I swear.”

It haunts Remus to think what would have become of them if he hadn’t answered that call.  


  


* * *

  


  
On the drive home, Harry falls asleep the moment he’s strapped into his carseat, and Remus spends the first ten minutes watching him in the passenger side mirror and pushing away each terrible fear as it arises. He grounds himself in the sight of Harry’s dear sleeping face, and the sound of Sirius singing along to the radio, even the parts where there are no words, just making noise to make noise, and the thrum of the car around him, beneath him. He’s right here, alive and safe. Pay attention. The curl of Harry’s fist against the seatbelt, Sirius’s fingers drumming on the wheel, the sunlight sparkling through white clouds. Stay with the details of your real life. That’s what his therapist taught him, when he was eight and every creak in the night was Fenrir Greyback, every dream a flashback, a panic attack. Know where you are, really, and see what’s around you.

Harry makes a fretful noise in his sleep, but he doesn’t wake.

“He’s fast,” Remus says at last. “You can teach him football any day now.”

“Think so?”

“I daresay he’ll be a star athlete like his father and his godfather, while I freeze or stew or scald on the sidelines and some well-meaning bloke with paint on his face tries to explain the rules to me.” 

As if Remus hadn’t spent almost a decade as a spectator at his best friend’s games, placing bets on the House Football Cup, even waking early to watch them (mostly Sirius) practice in the pink light of the morning sun. He doesn’t need strangers to take pity on him just because he could never play the damn game himself.

But Sirius says, “This time I’ll be the bloke with paint on his face,” and Remus can only laugh.

As they pull up to the cottage, Remus glances at Harry again. “He’s so like James. And like Lily. Brave. Clever. Perhaps a bit reckless, even at three. I wish they could know him.” Sirius’s eyes have that bleak faraway look they get whenever Remus mentions James — still angry and heartbroken, even now, even years later — so Remus takes his hand, always so soft against Remus’s calluses, and kisses the flat of his fingers, bent into a fist. “But I’m so glad he has you. God, Sirius, if Harry had to grow up without you — ”

Sirius voice is fierce: “He has both of us.”

That night Harry stirs and squalls instead of sleeping, and when Remus whispers, “I shouldn’t have let him nap so long, I swear I’ll never get this right,” Sirius just shrugs and, lifting Harry into his arms, asks if Remus would like tea.

As he carries Harry to the kitchen to boil water, he starts singing "Golden Slumbers" in a voice as gentle as ever Lily’s had been. Remus, listening, humming along, pulls his quilt tight around his bare shoulders and allows the warmth of the night to carry his heart through the fear.


End file.
